A Year in Reading: Emily M. Keeler

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Years ago, a lover read me a John Ashbery poem, “At North Farm.” We were sitting at his kitchen table, and my head was on my arms, and his voice as he read was ringing through the old wood, through my hands and into my head; the poem and his voice walked through me arm in arm.

A few weeks later, I asked him to read me the one about the cat again. He had no idea what I was talking about — the poem wasn’t about anything, as far as he could tell, even if it had a narrator — I mean, speaker — who puts out a dish of milk at night. He still reads poetry like a perfect kind of pop music, near-meaningless lyrics that nudge you toward a feeling and let your own mind suggest the rest.

I accepted that here was another thing I knew nothing about, and that though I might like a good poem or pop song every now and then, I’ll always be on the anxious, vigilant look out for characters and narratives — in essence, I will always want something to interpret. I want to know what it’s all about.

So it was a relief this year to be given Eileen Myles’sInferno. I started reading it almost as soon as it was in my hands, and I couldn’t put it down. Inferno is, of course, “a poet’s novel” and so it hit me at the perfect half way point; Eileen is the poet, Eileen is the narrator, and the book is about her and New York City and poetry and sex and love. I felt all shook up by the messy intractable beauty of some of the lines, but even more so by the willfulness of this narrator, this character, this poet writing herself into being. “So I’m beginning to wonder about the book I’m in”, this poet, Eileen, says in the middle, and I think to myself, yes, what is this about? And she answers: “You always get to know how the real person fared,” you come away knowing that something happened. And because she wrote it down, in some way it also happens to you, the reader. This, it dawned anew on me, is what it has always been about; some magic thing is transferred from the page to your mind, and room is made for the richness of a new feeling or thought.

Afterward, I was changed and ready to explore. Guilluame Morrisette’sI Am My Own Betrayalwas a great next step — a combined poetry and short fiction collection on the theme of willful alienation that reads with a warmth and humor I wasn’t expecting from this Montreal based member of the so-called “Alt Lit” community. Here’s a real good part from “I Don’t Know What A Poem Is But It’s Not Preventing Me From Writing Poems,” one of my favorite of his poems — perhaps for obvious reasons: “and licking your face/ is a sensation poetry cannot reproduce/ but fuck nature I rejected nature.”

Natalie Zina Walschots, another Canadian poet, tickled me with her newest book, DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillians, getting down into deliciously crackling and submissive syllables the eros of imaginary evils—I just melt as she supplicates to King Pin: “my body / a blister / that you squeeze”.

Michael Robbins’sAlien vs Predator is like an album I’ve played on repeat; the poems are hard and funny and stuck now like ear worms in some old part of my brain. They’re sitting there waiting for when I just really need to catch up to my breath by hiccuping along to the short stepping swagger of “My New Asshole” until I hit that humbling, defenseless last line…or for when I’m hit with the urge to be pushed further into the delight and despair of being alive today, being not quite punk as fuck or as hard like metal in this mercurial and fast moving world, by tugging petulantly on the black jersey sleeve of “I Did This to My Vocabulary.”

And of course, I went back to Ashbery, too, to page through his Selected Poems and give myself over to his about-nothingness, to the seeds of feeling that are planted by language.

Oh, deebee I am endlessly delighted by your interpretation of “At North Farm”!
Santa Claus makes sense. And is so much nicer than the cat I was picturing, running all over the world with some dead thing–“the thing he has for you”–in its mouth.

This is the year in which I read too little of contemporary books, even if I bought some 30 or so books, mostly published this year! But in between heavy travels, and a new job that demands my attention like a thrift collector, I found a few. The travel itself brought me in contact with Simon Sylvester’sThe Visitors. It is a wonderful book that tells the story of a strange, quiet town in Scotland being transformed by the incursion of “strangers.” It is rare that a novel mines this level of landscape awareness, or that a novel push you to feel the air of an unknown land blowing at you from reading about it on paper. I visited Scotland for the first time this year, but this book imprinted more than my eyes saw of that wonderful nation during my trip there. The Visitors appears in America next year, and I can’t wait to begin crowing more about it.
I read through The Jewish War by the early-century historian, Flavius Josephus. It is a remarkable attempt to portray Jewish history through a secular lens much different than from that contained in the Torah and the Bible.
The howling masterpiece of 2015 must surely be Eka Kurniawan’sBeauty Is a Wound. It is -- I mean it -- a howl, an outrage, and a sheer burst of particular talent. It is the kind of thing you want fiction to do, and the kind of thing you want to imagine it is doing. It tells the story of a woman who returns from the dead after having birthed a “shirt-like” human being who is uber-ironically named “Beauty.” Kuniarwan sharpens the story of Indonesia with an energy that is rare. An earth-shattering review in Publishers Weekly in June first brought it to my attention, then in October, my agent signed him, and in November I met him in Indonesia.
Just last week, I read Make Your Home Among Strangers by my friend Jennine Capó Crucet, and it struck a chord with me. As a friend, I went into the book with a thicker skin, but it is a genuine, heartfelt portrait of a young woman striving to plant her feet firmly in the soil of an adopted country. It is believable, intriguing, and bright.
More from A Year in Reading 2015Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.